from congregant to congregant, offering the body, offering the blood, until he got to a little boy who, seeing the piece of bread, stopped the pastor short. “He asked me if there were any nuts in it,” Miller-Zurell said. “His mom, who was standing behind him, made him. And he only took it after I assured him that there were no nuts.”
In a world where more and more people are realizing that things like nuts and wheat and even certain pungent scents can make them quite sick, religious organizations are reconsidering the most time-honored of traditions.
Communion wafers are now available in rice and soy. Religious supply stores are offering hypo-allergenic incense. Churches are banning cologne and cutting back on Easter lilies. Fresh pine boughs for the holidays are often out. A group of nuns in Missouri invented a host with only a trace of wheat so that the gluten-sensitive could digest it.
“I’ve just been amazed — there’s more and more and more,” said Miller-Zurell, who leads New Hope Lutheran Church in Columbia. “I suspect it’s an increase in allergies and certainly an awareness on my part.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 8 percent of children suffer from a food allergy. And every year, the organization reports, allergic reactions are responsible for 30,000 cases of anaphylaxis, 2,000 hospitalizations and 150 deaths.
The Rev. Sue Montgomery, a Pennsylvania pastor who works on a national level to help the Presbyterian church become more accessible for disabled parishioners, says that as more people are diagnosed with allergies, clergy must bend to meet their needs. “The invitation to the Lord’s Table is for everyone,” she likes to tell people, “even those with food allergies.”
Montgomery says religious organizations must provide for worshipers with certain dietary needs, just as they build ramps for those in wheelchairs or offer Bibles for the blind.
“We’re moving toward seeing disabilities as diversity rather than an aberration or something abnormal that needs to be cured or fixed,” she said. “The church is just beginning to wake up to that.”
Just a few years ago, national media attention turned to the Catholic church after a couple of dioceses refused to offer first communion to girls suffering from Celiac disease — an inability to tolerate wheat. Under orders from the Vatican, the churches, one in Massachusetts and the other in New Jersey, would not consider using soy or rice wafers, insisting that only the traditional wheat host was legitimate.
The problem seemed solved when Benedictine nuns in Missouri developed a wheat wafer with only trace levels of gluten — a wafer that’s passed muster with both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and those with Celiac disease.
But even with the new wafer, Catholics with food allergies still feel somewhat ostracized, according to Chris Spreitzer, who founded the Catholic Celiac Society.
A New York woman, whose husband and three daughters have Celiac disease, said that during a holiday service in Orange County, Calif., last month the priest stopped the ceremony to reprimand her husband and the girls for joining the line for wine without having taken the bread.
“My husband had to stand there and explain,” she said. “It kind of made a small uproar. You don’t want to always be the person standing out in the crowd and making a small scene.”
